Bataille reads sacrifice as staged self-awareness of dying, a deliberate trick.

Evidence

Whereas Heidegger grants an existential status to being-toward-death and considers it an event of freedom, Bataille suggests that “sacrifice in reality reveals nothing.” It is not simply the absolute manifestation of negativity. It is also a comedy. For Bataille, death reveals the human subject’s animal side, which he refers to moreover as the subject’s “natural being.” “For man to reveal himself in the end, he has to die, but he will have to do so while alive—by looking at himself ceasing to exist,” he adds. In other words, the human subject has to be fully alive at the very moment of dying, to be aware of his or her death, to live with the impression of actually dying. Death itself must become awareness of the self at the very time that it does away with the conscious being. “In a sense, this is what happens (what at least is on the point of taking place, or what takes place in an elusive, fugitive manner), by means of a subterfuge in the sacrifice. In the sacrifice, the sacrificed identifies himself with the animal on the point of death. Thus he dies seeing himself die, and even, in some sense, through his own will, at one with the weapon of sacri- fice. But this is play!” And for Bataille, play is more or less the means by which the human subject “voluntarily tricks himself.” — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 164

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Bataille’s contrast with Heidegger: sacrifice as ‘play’/‘comedy’ rather than existential freedom.
• XREF: Connects to Mbembe’s necropolitics framework — death as theater ties to how sovereignty stages killing. — connects to: For Bataille death is excess and self-consciousness, not Hegelian meaning. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 26; Extreme acts of self-sacrifice can function as argument rather than abandonment of it — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive: The Complete…, 569; Sacrifice’s dual function—self-surrender and self-preservation—turns magic into cunning rationality. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 299

Related

• For Bataille death is excess and self-consciousness, not Hegelian meaning. (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• Extreme acts of self-sacrifice can function as argument rather than abandonment of it #expands (0.82) — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive, 569